Author: Emil Karabekian

DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia)
July 19, 2017 Wednesday
EQUIPMENT WAS REMOVED FROM TANKS ON THE NEW YEAR'S NIGHT
by Oleg Goryaev
Source: Kommersant, July 17, 2017, p. 4
HIGHLIGHT: CONTRACT SERGEANTS RECEIVED MINIMAL TERMS OF IMPRISONMENT
FOR THEFT OF RADIO STATIONS AND CONTROL BLOCKS FROM TANKS; Contract
servicemen were sentenced for theft of military property in the North
Caucasian Military District.
The North Caucasian district military court declined the appeals of
contract junior sergeants of the 102nd Russian military base (Gyumri,
Armenia) Dmitry Londarenko and Nikolai Onishchuk, 22. The fifth
garrison court sentenced them to one year and four months and one year
of imprisonment in penal colony respectively for theft of radio
stations and command blocks from tanks for the purpose of theft.
The instance of appeals of the North Caucasian district military court
heard the complaints about the sentences to Londarenko and Onishchuk
sentenced according to accusation of two episodes of theft committed
by a group of persons according to preliminary conspiracy (article 159
of the Criminal Code). According to documents of the case, junior
sergeants Londarenko and Onishchuk, 22, who came from Ukraine and
served since 2013 under contract in Armenian Gyumri as tank driver and
deputy commander of a platoon respectively decided to steal radio
stations from the technical park of Alagyaz training range. A local
resident who worked as a cook in the mess room was their accomplice.
In the afternoon of December 30 of 2016, the criminals drove in the
cook's car to the combat hardware park of the 102nd Russian military
base. Londarenko unnoticeable entered the garage, opened the lids of
hatches of three T-72B tanks and stole radio stations from them.
Afterwards, the fellow-servicemen carried the equipment to the car of
the accomplice who had to sell the stolen items. Nest night, the
sergeants decided to repeat the attempt but this time the cook gave
them his car but did not go with the servicemen and stayed home to
celebrate the New Year. Investigators found out that at 3 a.m. on
January 1 of 2017, the junior sergeants penetrated into the park of
combat vehicles again. Onishchuk was on the watch again and Londarenko
carried out five radio receivers, two radar stations and three command
blocks K-1. The criminals loaded the equipment into the car that they
drove back to the owner.
The theft was discovered in the morning of January 8, officers of the
military unit conducted investigation and found involvement of
Londarenko and Onishchuk into the crime. They did not deny the guilt
and said that the cook proposed them to commit the theft having
promised to pay 60,000 Armenian drams (approximately 7,500 rubles) for
one radio station. A criminal case was instituted against Londarenko
and Onishchuk about the fact of theft of property of the military unit
worth 455,200 rubles. Law-enforcement agencies of Armenia conducted
investigation against the cook. During preliminary investigation the
servicemen compensated the military unit for 132,000 rubles of loss.
Having studied the case about theft of radio equipment, the fifth
garrison military court sentenced Londarenko to one year and four
months of imprisonment and Onishchuk to one year of imprisonment in
penal colony. The court did not impose monetary penalties on the
sentenced but obliged them to repay the remaining damage worth 322,000
rubles.
The contract servicemen considered the sentence too harsh: their
families are in dire straits and they have no possibility to take care
about them. However, the instance of appeals considered the sentence
of the garrison court justified and declined the complaint.
[Translated from Russian]

Interfax - Russia & CIS General Newswire
July 20, 2017 Thursday 3:27 PM MSK
Russia to demand extradition of blogger convicted in Azerbaijan
MOSCOW. July 20
The Russian Foreign Ministry and the Prosecutor General's Office may
demand the extradition of blogger Alexander Lapshin, Russian Human
Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova said.
Such negotiations are under way, she said.
"The Foreign Ministry and the Prosecutor General's Office may demand
his [Lapshin's] extradition under the 1993 and 2007 international
convention on legal assistance in criminal matters and seek his
extradition for criminal proceedings on the territory of our country.
As I know, such work is being conducted, negotiations are underway,'
Moskalkova told reporters on Thursday.
The extradition of Lapshin by Belarus to Azerbaijan is a violation of
the rights of a Russian citizen, she said. "I had asked Belarus not to
extradite him to Azerbaijan. But unfortunately, a different decision
was made. It seems to be it's a violation of the rights of a Russian
citizen," Moskalkova said.
The Baku court for grave crimes on Thursday sentenced blogger Lapshin,
a citizen of Russia and Israel, who was charged with illegally
visiting Nagorno-Karabakh, to three years in jail, an Interfax
correspondent reported from the courtroom.
According to the court decision, Lapshin will serve his sentence in a
general-security prison.
According to earlier reports, Lapshin did not admit his guilt at the
trial, saying that Nagorno-Karabakh was a territory of Azerbaijan. He
said he had visited Karabakh as a tourist and had no political
purposes.
According to Baku, Lapshin, a Russian-Israeli citizen, illegally
visited Nagorno-Karabakh without obtaining Azerbaijan's official
permission in April 2011 and October 2012, thus violating the laws on
Azerbaijan's state border and on passports. Apart from that, Lapshin
called for the recognition of the independence of the Nagorno-Karabakh
Republic on social networks on April 6, 2016 and June 29, 2016.
Lapshin was put on the 'black list' for having visited
Nagorno-Karabakh without the consent of Azeri authorities. Such people
cannot enter Azerbaijan. However, Lapshin was able to enter Azerbaijan
through Georgia in June 2015, producing a Ukrainian passport with a
different spelling of his name.
The investigative department for grave crimes of the Azerbaijani
Prosecutor General's Office opened a criminal case on charges of
repeated public calls against the state and illegal crossing of
Azerbaijan's state border. A person convicted of these charges may
receive a sentence of five to eight years in prison.
On December 16, 2016 it emerged that Lapshin had been detained in
Belarus at the request of Azerbaijan.
The Belarusian Supreme Court rejected Lapshin's appeal against his
extradition to Azerbaijan on February 7. He was extradited on the same
day.
av ng kf

Turan Information Agency, Azerbaijani Opposition
 Tuesday
Aliev's journey from Warsaw to Istanbul
by Analytical Service Turan
Aliyev's tour began with a visit to Poland on June 26-28, and ended
with a dinner with President Erdogan and a conversation with US
Secretary of State, Tillerson, during an oil conference in Istanbul on
July 9-10.
In Poland, Aliyev actually announced a return to active pro-European
politics, somewhat even in a defiant tone, which until quite recently
could seriously disappoint Moscow. But today the information coming
from various capitals: from super-power to the countries barely
noticeable on world maps, show that the time of compromises between
East and West begins to replace the era of the last years of
confrontation in the space from Ukraine to Syria.
Important geopolitical players in the South Caucasus, the United
States and Russia, at the G-20 summit in Hamburg demonstrated to the
whole world the convergence of positions in Ukraine and Syria, which
are clear destabilizing factors of relations between the West and
Russia.
Perhaps the meeting between Trump and Putin was the most notable
informal agenda for the summit, which, at the time of the settlement
of an important geopolitical confrontation, unleashed a knot of issues
- combating climate warming and a free trade zone.
This key meeting, which satisfied both sides, creates prerequisites
for reaching agreement on the South Caucasus, where the closer
regional cooperation between Azerbaijan and Armenia with the European
Union and the achievement of a compromise peace between the two
belligerent states finding in the transaction between the Soviet past
and the European future are important regional themes.
Reports from Yerevan that Armenia is preparing to sign an agreement on
a comprehensive and expanded partnership with the consent of the
Kremlin suggest that the South Caucasus figured the US-Russian
dialogue. This agreement may be called a compromise, since it excludes
the wording on the goal of EU membership, but at the same time, it
lays the platform for association with this interstate organization.
The same agreement is being prepared with Azerbaijan, which, as
always, is more restrained in the issue of reaching a deal with the
EU. It is expected that both countries will sign agreements with the
EU in November in Brussels at the summit of the "Eastern Partnership".
The last established cooperation between the US and Russia creates
real chances for this. It should also be taken into account that
unlike Georgia, which always outstripped its Caucasian neighbors in
the European integration, Armenia and Azerbaijan became members of
various European unions and projects virtually simultaneously. This
was the case with membership in the Council of Europe, Partnership for
Peace, etc. Facts give grounds to say that both sides will conclude
long-awaited agreements with the EU in November, which will raise the
bar of relations to a new level of European integration.
These issues, as shown by the brief official report on the meeting
between Aliyev and Tillerson, were touched upon in Istanbul. The
Secretary of State, who took part in the G20 summit on the eve of the
meeting, and has information on Trump and Putin's agreements on a
range of issues, could more confidently talk with Aliyev about the
near future of his country's destiny, opening the corridor for
maneuvers in the framework of the latest agreements between the
presidents of the United States and Russia.
The meager and veiled information of the Aliyev administration on his
meeting with the Secretary of State, shows that the issue of
Azerbaijan's development based on a stable transaction from
authoritarianism to democracy was the key one. The silent reaction of
the United States to the last year's referendum in Azerbaijan, which
opened the way to intra-family continuity of power, is now being
continued in the Azerbaijani-American dialogue and increasingly points
to the fact that the issue of the 2018 elections with the planned
castling of Ilham and Mehriban Aliyevs becomes more realistic . But
this castling is closely tied to the commitment to reforms, of which
12 road economic maps and national human rights action plans, etc., of
which Washington has been mildly reminiscent recently, are an integral
part.
We talked about Aliyev's visit to Poland and Turkey, but we do not
know anything about his meetings between June 28 and July 8. However,
However, his one-to-one dinner with Erdogan, which plays an important
role in Azerbaijani affairs, shows that Aliyev was already ready by
this time for a talk with Tillerson in the atmosphere of the warming
the Turkish-American, American-Russian and Turkish-Russian relations.
This mutual agreement between the important participants of the
Caucasian process creates favorable conditions for the reform of
Azerbaijan, stuck in the midst of the ups and downs of its 25-year
post-Soviet autonomous existence. But, of course, the conversation
between Aliyev and the Uzbek delegation was not about it.

Please find the attached press release of the Ministry of Diaspora.
Sincerely,
Media and PR Department:
( 374 10) 585601, internal 805
----------------------
Sincerely
Department of Press and Public Relations
( 374 10) 585601, extension 805

260 The RA Minister of Diaspora received the Egyptian-Armenian Ambassador Suren Byramyan.docx
application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document

JPEG image

IMG_0881.JPG
JPEG image

IMG_0883.JPG
JPEG image

IMG_0891.JPG
JPEG image

PA Newswire: Sport News
 Tuesday 5:23 PM BST
MONTPELLIER NAME MICHEL DER ZAKARIAN AS NEW BOSS
Montpellier have appointed Michel Der Zakarian as their new head coach.
Der Zakarian moves from Ligue 2 outfit Reims to replace Jean-Louis
Gasset, who has left the club after half a season in charge.
The Armenian was announced on mhscfoot.com as the new man in charge at
Montpellier, where he spent 10 seasons as a player before retiring in
1998, but the length of his contract was undisclosed.
The move was initially announced in a statement from Reims, which
read: ``Michel Der Zakarian and Stade de Reims have mutually brought
an end to their contractual relationship.
``The directors of the club and their counterparts at Montpellier
Herault Sport Club have reached an agreement in principle for his
transfer.
``Franck Rizzetto, Michel Der Zakarian's assistant at the club, will
also move to MHSC, his first professional club.''
Reims named his replacement, promoting David Guion from his role with
their reserve team.